Readings week of December 15th.
- Linda Lueng
- Dec 22, 2025
- 6 min read
Readings from last week's Daily Contemplative Pauses
*All previous readings & reflections can be found here*
Monday, December 15th with Lacey
Reading: “Come, Lord, Jesus,” the Advent mantra, means that all of Christian history has to live out a kind of deliberate emptiness, a kind of chosen non-fulfillment. This keeps the field of life wide open and especially open to the grace and to a future created by God rather than ourselves. This is exactly what it means to be “awake,” as the Gospel urges us! We can also use other a words for Advent: aware, alive, attentive, alert, awake are all appropriate. Advent is, above all else, a call to full consciousness and Presence…
“Come, Lord Jesus” is a leap into the kind of freedom and surrender that is rightly called the virtue of hope. The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves. We are able to trust that he will come again, just as Jesus has come into our past, into our private dilemmas and into our suffering world… “Come, Lord Jesus” becomes then not a cry of desperation but an assured shout of cosmic hope." – Excerpt from Preparing for Christmas, Richard Rohr
Chant: Inner Life of Being, bearing Christ within me, come – John Tavener, lyrics by Alan Krema and Darlene Franz
Tuesday, December 16th with Faye
Reading: "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light."
"IN ONE RESPECT if in no other this metaphor of Isaiah's is a very relevant one for us and our age because we are also, God knows, a people who walk in darkness. There seems little need to explain. If darkness is meant to suggest a world where nobody can see very well—either themselves, or each other, or where they are heading, or even where they are standing at the moment; if darkness is meant to convey a sense of uncertainty, of being lost, of being afraid; if darkness suggests conflict, conflict between races, between nations, between individuals each pretty much out for himself when you come right down to it; then we live in a world that knows much about darkness. Darkness is what our newspapers are about. Darkness is what most of our best contemporary literature is about. Darkness fills the skies over our own cities no less than over the cities of our enemies. And in our single lives, we know much about darkness too. If we are people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths." – Originally published in The Hungering Dark by Frederic Buechner
Chant: Kyrie Eleison
Wednesday, December 17th
Reading: “Ask that your consciousness be filled with Light; ask to be illumined to follow the path of simplicity with integrity and inner sight.
“Inspired by Divine Light and Love you begin to express Divine Will in action: thus will your journey be eased, joy will nest in your heart...
“A greater state of awareness being aroused, you recognize the interconnectedness of everything and everyone: the unity of diversity.” — Nan Merrill, Lumen Christi: Holy Wisdom
Chant: With you is the well of life and in your light we see light – Susan Latimer
Thursday, December 18th with Faye
Reading: 'Say the Light' by Jan Richardson
Say the night
was long.
Say the angels
kept vigil,
and the creatures;
that the stars stood still
in their course.
Say even the shadows
held their path,
stretched toward what
they could not see,
lending it their hiddenness
to shelter it from view.
Say at the darkest hour
the day broke
into astonished wonder,
that it arrived first as song,
then as flesh,
then as love
radiant in its joy.
Say the light lives.
Say it will never spend itself,
that it is stubborn,
that it endures.
Say the light
is what we hold
for each other,
carrying it in the marrow,
the hollow of the heart
that splinters open in hope
to illumine
every shattered thing.
Friday, December 19th with Catherine
Reading: Reflection on images of the Incarnation by Kat Armas
…“The Incarnation is not a Hallmark tableau, It is not antiseptic. It is not symbolic. It is flesh and risk and effort and breath. And in Mary's case, it is the vulnerability of a young girl in an occupied land, giving birth far from home, without the care she might have needed, unsure of what would come next. Holiness was never meant to be sterile. Holiness is God choosing to be born into the very places we often avoid…
Christian imagination has often preferred a controlled, orderly God, a God
untouched by bodily need, a God who enters clean rooms rather than
messy lives. But the raw, unedited birth of Jesus tells a different story.
Advent has always held grief and longing alongside hope.
The birth of Jesus is no exception. The same chapter that gives us angels and shepherds also gives us Herod's violence, families displaced, children in danger, a holy family on the run. The shadow of empire hovers over the manger. And yet, it is precisely here — in the unstable, the dangerous, the unplanned — that God comes to dwell…"
“Advent peace is not the peace of sanitized images. It is the peace of God-with-us in our flesh, our struggle, our vulnerability. A peace that does not hide from the world's pain but inhabits it.”
Chant: Be right here, in the Heart of God – Henry Schoenfield
Saturday, December 20th
Reading: “During the season… into the picture the Virgin Mary makes her appearance. Sometimes it's on the third Sunday of Advent where we dedicate a whole day to pondering her effect, sometimes in monastic traditions she sort of weaves her way through the whole thing. But it's very important because come to think of it, had there been no Blessed Virgin there would have been no Incarnation and no Advent, no nothing. She's an indisputable essential part of the story. Not only the what of it and the how of it, but in a deep way the why of it. And it's been not without reason that Mary has been called the mother of contemplatives, because in her bearing, both literally and spiritually, during this whole richly feminine and in gentle time of annunciation, gestation, and child birthing she models to us in essence what it means to be an active co-creator and participant in a world in which the treasure from the heart of God, Jesus was not sent as a kind of remediation for sin, but as the sort of crowning revelation of what it means to stand here with one foot in the finite world, one foot in the infinite, bridging the gap in our heart and creating out of that the wholeness, which is divine love.”
– Cynthia Bourgeault, CAC’s An Advent Meditation with Cynthia Bourgeault Unedited Transcript
Sunday, December 21st
Reading:
Winter is a verb.
She is the great listener.
She draws life down into roots, bones and dreams.
What cannot yet live in daylight
finds refuge in the dark.
In this season the veil thins
between waking life and the world beneath.
Dreams speak louder.
Ancestors lean closer.
The soul remembers the language it spoke
before it learned to perform,
as it descends into the void.
What goes underground is not lost,
it is being shaped.
The seed does not hurry the thaw,
it listens for the moment
it must break open.
Here, in the quiet cold,
the forgotten parts of us gather ...
If we stay long enough,
if we do not rush the return,
something ancient stirs.
Spring does not arrive by force.
It comes because winter was honoured.
There will be no greening of the world
without your willingness
to winter well.
For it is in the dark soil of the soul
that the present remembers your name.
– Laura Patryas
Chant:
O Radiant Dawn,
splendor of eternal light:
come and shine on those who dwell in darkness and in the
shadow of death.
Comments